By Nick Swan ~ The Daily Helmsman

After a fierce battle between 10 candidates, the Democrats have chosen not a person they particularly like, but someone they believe is electable.

Sure, no one in his party is particularly excited about him, but John Kerry is apparently the man who can beat Bush, and if you don't believe it, just ask him.

The main qualification for being electable, it seems, is serving in Vietnam.

John Kerry did so, and he served honorably. But being a war hero is not a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card.

George McGovern and Bob Dole were both war heroes in World War II. The voters rejected them not because of their service but because they didn't feel either could lead the country adequately.

Kerry mentions Vietnam in nearly every speech he makes, but people will not and should not vote for him for something he did 30 years ago. His qualifications for the presidency will be based on his Senate record, which shows precisely why he isn't qualified.

President Bush recently quipped that Kerry has been in the Senate long enough to take both sides on every issue. He can be forgiven for the understatement.

Kerry has taken so many different sides on so many issues, I doubt if even he knows what he truly believes at this point.

He voted against the liberation of Kuwait but later said it was the right thing to do.

He voted for the liberation of Iraq but later said he only voted to "threaten" the use of force.

He speaks of the bond with his "band of brothers" in Vietnam, but when he returned from war, he denounced many of them as war criminals.

Kerry claims to be strong on defense, but he voted against funding the MX and Patriot missiles, the Apache and Blackhawk helicopters, the B-1 bomber and virtually every major piece of military equipment used to fight the war on terror.

He denounces Bush's lack of emphasis on intelligence for the war on terror, but during the eight years he sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kerry voted to cut intelligence three times, including a $1.5 billion cut in 1995 that was not co-sponsored by a single member of the Senate.

Not once did he vote to increase funding for human intelligence, which he now says we drastically need.

He voted for NAFTA. Now he blasts it.

He made a major speech in 1992 denouncing affirmative action. Now he supports it and says he'd love to be the second "black president."

He rails against "Benedict Arnold" corporations that send jobs overseas, yet he receives campaign contributions from some of these same corporations.

The only thing Kerry has been consistent about is his preference for keeping dictators in power.

He said he would have sent in troops to keep Haitian dictator Jean-Bertrand Aristide in power. He virulently opposed the liberation of Grenada and Nicaragua in the 1980s from Communist dictatorships. Now it seems he would have preferred Saddam Hussein still in power as well.

Kerry's love for tyrants looks to be mutual. Kerry's recent speeches have been broadcast on Radio Pyongyang and reported glowingly by Korea Central News Agency. Both are run with the expressed consent of everybody's favorite bouffant-wearing dictator, Kim Jong Il.

If you combine all these inconsistencies in Kerry's record with the fact that he is also an elitist, French-looking, incredibly boring and more liberal than Ted Kennedy, you may wonder why the Dems picked him. Then again, they did pick Al Gore. Maybe they just enjoy losing.

Nick Swan is a University of Memphis senior and columnist for the Daily Helmsman. He is the grandson of Marjorie Swan of Pocahontas.